The bookstore party started off crowded and noisy. It reminded Annie of the party at which she’d met Graham, many of the same people cramming the aisles, leaving their empty or half-full plastic cups everywhere, even among the books on the shelves. Again those shelves had been pushed back to make an open space in the middle of the shop. There were maybe fifty or so chairs set up there, but hardly anyone was sitting in them. They all preferred being able to move around, to talk, to get more easily to the tables set at opposite ends of the space, the tables laden with wine and crackers and cheese and plates of canapés.

Annie, along with Lucas and Sarah and the bookstore staff, was busy greeting people, thanking them for coming. She saw John Norris across the room and waved. She would talk to him at the house—she’d sent an invitation to him with a note saying how much she appreciated his sitting with her the night after Graham died. Natalie and Don Schumer were there, Natalie in a kind of caftan that made her look more enormous than ever. She saw Edith near the doorway. Bill, Rosemary Gregory, Georgie. Dozens of others. She saw Frieda too, but couldn’t catch her eye. They would have to talk at some point today, that was clear. It would be too awkward not to. What she hoped was that by now Frieda would have found a way to let go of her anger.

After half an hour or so of everyone’s mixing and greeting, Peter went to the microphone set up in the middle of the chairs and asked them all to sit down. He waited, watching them, letting them settle. Annie moved to the back to find her seat. She would have to leave early to get back to the house ahead of the crowd.

When almost everyone was seated, Peter welcomed them on Graham’s behalf. It would be a bit like a Quaker meeting, he said—anyone could speak when the spirit moved them.

There was the initial awkwardness of that kind of gathering. After the long silence, Peter rose and went to the mike again. Annie watched him as he choked up, trying to talk of his friendship with Graham. After he sat down, Bill stood up and spoke movingly about the early days of the bookstore, how it was Graham’s energy and bonhomie (“I had to look up how to pronounce that,” he said, smiling) that made it all work. And John spoke very briefly, about their long friendship and his inability to truly believe that it was over.

Then Frieda got up and walked to the microphone. She was in her usual uniform, a longish skirt, Birkenstocks, and a striped, long-sleeved T-shirt. Annie was suddenly nervous for her, she looked so awkward, so vulnerable.

But to Annie’s surprise, as she began, her voice was steady, she seemed completely comfortable. She made people laugh, actually, introducing herself to those who didn’t know her as Graham’s first wife, the one who “barely escaped alive,” she said. “But I’m smart enough to look back on my years with him as the most lively, the most funny, the wildest years of my life, too.” She told a few anecdotes about Graham’s kindness to her over the years. “Nothing he needed to do,” she said. “But he did it.” She said what she most admired about him was exactly that kind of thing, because, she said, “he was a person who never wasted a friendship, or a relationship.” It seemed to Annie that Frieda was looking at her, but it was hard to tell because of her glasses.

“To Graham,” Frieda said then, raising her glass. Then she was looking at Annie, directly. “And to Annie, who did so much better a job of it than I.”

Unexpected sudden tears rose to Annie’s eyes. From across the room, she raised her opened hands ceremonially in a gesture meant to thank Frieda. For the toast, of course. For everything it must have cost her to be able to give it. For making things right again between them. And for weathering for so long the lasting complexity of their entwined lives.

A number of people had turned to Annie, smiling, raising their glasses, and Annie smiled back, nodding.

When the next speaker got up, though, she took the opportunity to make her way to the door, out of the shop, and into the still-hot evening air to begin her slow walk back to the house. As she walked, she was thinking first of Frieda, feeling a near-joyous relief that Frieda had been able somehow to put the pain around the scattering of the ashes behind her.

And she’d been so elegant! Annie had been worried for her as she walked to the mike, worried about how she would do. She’d grown so used to Frieda’s role in her life and Graham’s life that she hadn’t thought about Frieda’s other life, her life as a teacher, as someone who stood up in front of people every day and talked to them about history, about the movement of peoples around the world in ancient times. She was glad for that too, she realized—for being reminded of this other Frieda.

Then, after a few more blocks, walking past all the houses she’d walked past hundreds of times before, she began to think of how familiar this pattern was —leaving the bookstore before everyone else, in the old days the ones who would stay for the refreshments or the signing, or both. Leaving in order to be home in time to get the party ready.

She had a sense now that this particular departure was the ending of a great many things. It wasn’t just that Graham was gone from her life, but that the bookstore too would go away. The life of the bookstore. Peter had talked about this with her a few weeks earlier, his wish to sell. But she had assumed this would happen. The store would belong to someone else. It would change.

Oh, they would welcome her, Annie was pretty sure of that. At readings, at parties. But there would be a slow diminishment of the idea that she was in any way important to these activities. And of course, the after-parties would move elsewhere—the new location depending on who bought the store, who would be running it, and how. In any case, her appearance at those parties, or at the readings, would stop being particularly noted. Perhaps, actually, it would become unwelcome, it would be seen as a kind of sad wish to stay connected to something she was no longer part of, a desire to feel important, somehow.

She could imagine it, at some point someone introducing her as Graham’s wife, as his widow, someone else saying “Graham who?”

And that would be that.

No, she’d stay away from the store after this. There were plenty of other literary events she could go to in Cambridge or Boston—at libraries, at festivals, at benefits. She could be as busy in that world, in all likelihood, as she’d ever been, if that’s what she desired. But this would be the last of the events at Graham’s store for her.

She wasn’t even sure she’d miss it. Some of the point for her had always had to do with him, with his outsize pleasure in it all, his animation at the parties, his gratitude at what she’d made for him.

The house looked beautiful from the street, she thought. She walked slowly up the Caldwells’ driveway and pushed the gate open. She and Lucas and Sarah had bought a viburnum they were going to have planted in the backyard in honor of Graham, but for now, for the party, they’d left it sitting in a big pot by the front steps. It made a kind of bower out of the stoop.

Inside, the wineglasses set out on the big table gleamed in the early-evening light. All the windows were wide open, and the air moved gently in the house every now and then, carrying the glowing dust motes this way and that in the slant of sun. In the kitchen part of the room, the students in their white shirts and black slacks were talking back and forth, laughing, setting out the food from the caterer Sarah had hired. Annie moved around among them, making room for herself at the counter, room to toss a couscous salad she’d made, room to arrange some stuffed dates on a platter—both dishes she thought certain of the guests might look forward to.

Then she went upstairs to be alone until she heard the first of the old friends arriving.

It was going well, she thought as she greeted people. There were a number of the writers they’d grown close to, and Annie moved around among them. Mike, Edith’s ex-husband, had come with her, and Annie was glad to talk with him—it had been months since she’d seen him. John hugged her almost fiercely, and then his wife Betsy took her turn.

Annie was standing near the door, and when she saw Frieda coming up the long walk, she stepped outside and went quickly to her. They embraced, wordlessly, for a long moment. When they stepped back from each other, both of them had tears in their eyes.

“That was so beautiful, Frieda,” Annie said. “Your toast. Thank you.”

“I meant it,” Frieda said, “I meant it all.”

They stood, looking at each other. Then Annie said, “Well, come in. Come on in,” making a sweeping gesture of dramatic welcome, and they mounted the stairs together and went into the gathering noise of the house.

Others drifted in. Aaron Lambert was there, and Felicity and Everett Rogers. Don Schumer and Natalie, of course. The Caldwells had come over from next door, bringing their three teenage children with them, all tall and reedy, like their father. The kids stood in a little clot, slim statues, talking only occasionally, and only to each other. Whenever anyone else drew near, they looked awkward and frightened, so Annie didn’t approach them.